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[Flash 10 is required to watch video]
There is a ghost in my record player that thinks it is a DJ.
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My beautiful wife.
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Dear Tumblr,
We are going down to Houston this evening for a baby shower that Katie’s family is throwing for her. When we come back, there will be only about 35 days til our kid arrives. Who will it be? I am excited to find out.
Last night I was tweaking settings on the iPhone app and almost by accident created a “magic erase” tool that can delete a photos background in just a few swipes. You can see it in action here, accompanied by the soundtrack of an episode of Thundercats that I was watching at the same time. I think this app has got some legs, folks! I am getting enormous joy out of seeing some of my beta testers change their avatars to new pictures made with the app. Katie is so sick of hearing about it and seeing my silly test images, that she could poo!
WELL TOO BAD, KATIE. You married me, and now you are stuck with me and my low resolution revolution!
But all this pixel art and Thundercats begs a bigger question: now that we will have a new roommate, who will be the most immature person in our family? Sure, the baby will scream and wee uncontrollably all over itself, and will be unable to care for itself in many ways. However, I was voted “Class Spaz,” (Go, Colonel Zadock Magruder High School Class of ‘96 SENIORS!!!!!!!) and also am currently wearing an ill-fitting Super Mario Brothers teeshirt. I didn’t take a bath before coming to work. Also, I wee uncontrollably.
Place your bets now.
I am determined to submit Make Pixel Art 1.1 to the app store before leaving for Houston today. I have to update the help system to include the features added to this version, and also implement a simple news system that can be used to send updates to users after the app has been released. LET’S DO THIS THING, BEN!
Thanks for reading, internet. The pleasure has been 85% mine, which still leaves you with a very satisfying 15% slice.
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I love Kirk’s screamy face!
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Be the unicorn.
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AND HEY FOLKS, don’t think for one second that just because I’m doing lots of pixelized photos, I have stopped spending unreasonable amounts of time drawing tiny superheroes.
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Dear Tumblr,
My personal motto is “Launch it!,” so I am pleased to announce yet another XOXCO/Lullabot responsive redesign, this time for Safari Books Online (a subscription service that gives you online access to O’Reilly and other tech books). This was another really big site, with lots of different content types and special pages. Every single type of page looks great and tunes itself to work beautifull on smart phones, tables, and desktop computers.
Safari Books Online, three ways: desktop, tablet, smartphone. Click for full size.
This project and the Grammy project really kept XOXCO busy for the last quarter of 2011. We had so much work to do, I worked through the Christmas/New Years holiday. It is very gratifying to see these sites go live, and know now literally ten kazillion people are seeing our magical CSS and Javascript code in action. It is also very gratifying to now have a lot more time to work on stuff for ourselves.
In other exciting XOXCO news, yesterday we extended an offer to our engineer Damien to come on full time, and he said yes! He has been ALMOST full time for a while, but we’re making it official now so that we can give him paid vacation and sick days. Damien built a lot of the Safari site, built the first version of SendTab, and is one of the big reasons the color picker in Make Pixel Art is so awesome. HOORAY DAMIEN.
Beta copies of my apps went out to testers yesterday afternoon, and the feedback has been very positive. Adam posted a few funny shots combing the pixel filters from my app with the text magic from his app Textagon. @Bwarez posted this photo of his dog wearing pink sunglasses. I am pretty much in pixel heaven.
And last night, I was up late drawing rainbow unicorn horns and pouty girl lips to add to the inventory of silly things to stick on pictures. GOT ANY IDEAS OR REQUESTS? I will be drawing all day long, so send them in.
THANKS INTERNET, your hair looks great today.
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Dear Tumblr,
What was up with Tumblr’s outage last night? I blame David Carp personally for the fact that my posts last night received fewer than average “likes.”
As you may have seen, I made a pretty ridiculous amount of progress on the iPhone app. After leaving work and before going to my brother’s house for chicken fajitas, I was able to implement the sticker menu AND build out a small test library of stickers.
I was at first worried that I would have to do some sort of local database or web API hit to load all the stickers into the app. But in the end, I decided to simply convert each little sprite into a base64 encoded data url, and include that url in a static Javascript file that is included in the app. That means I can draw the sprites in Make Pixel Art on my iPad, use the built in sharing features to upload it to the internet, then use Make Pixel Art in Chrome to load the sprites and export them as data urls. It also means all of the assets in the app can be manually edited by just tweaking a text file. No image files, no database calls, no nothing!
I just love data urls. If you copy this string into your browser’s location bar, instead of talking to a web server somewhere to request a file, the browser will simply display an image because the url IS the image:
data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAADIAAAAyCAYAAAAeP4ixAAABB0lEQVRoBe2X0QnDMAxEk+I5OkBnyJAdKovUi7S4JeGQY+if78TlJxcbgnzSQ9b6ej7e921bRk/d90Vhv5wHqPWUl4J8/3YZtODi2kpLMO4u5BLrX4WJeJKyjGp/tH78gWzfjByJYXl3jGBgSrz8+ghZvaOZX/1HfGakc23yQseIEhfonfsIusGg89y1mpvxvoUOqzDjeQSzxqDzMBL5UGEiVoH7SHRk9ndeRtBZJV48j2DmGHReRpS4wEpwH0E3GHQeRpqb8b6FDqsw43kEs8ag8zAS+VBhIlaB+0h0ZPZ3XkbQWSVePI9g5hh0XkaUuMBKcB9BNxh0Hkaam/G+hQ6rMJNmHvkA+lmtpWbQ8lYAAAAASUVORK5CYII=
This is such a convenient way to represent data that would otherwise require a separate file and file delivery mechanism. As everything becomes smaller and more mobile, being able to simply package up a bunch of files into a series of short strings will be more and more helpful. I can imagine scenarios where entire applications will be delivered via simple links, no additional downloads necessary. IF YOU CAN SEE THIS LINK, YOU’VE ALREADY INSTALLED MY APP.
I am very easily excited by extreme edge case scenario.
If you are interested in doing more than just reading me talk about my apps, you can sign up to be a beta tester. This afternoon, I will send out beta versions of both Make Pixel Art for iPad and “PixelVision” for iPhone. Click here to get set up with TestFlight, which is the tool I use to deliver betas.
OR, if you would to help out but don’t to mess with beta versions, send me a photo (or a link to a photo) that you’d like me to pixelize with my new app, and I will pixelize the shit out of it!
Thanks for reading, internet. You are my BFF.
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Liked on Tumblr
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Here’s a few pictures from the test build for the app. Just messin around with it.
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“I am Adam. Prince of Eternia”
One frame closer…
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Heres 4 more backgrounds I made for PixelPix. I guess I’ll explain what it is since I didn’t in my last post. It’s a camera application that lets...
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The Morning GIF: Poor Will Riker, Forever Number 2. http://awe.sm/5f6Mr
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I drew a frogge
